Friday, June 08, 2012

Bradbury & Tarkovsky

As many of you will know by now, Ray Bradbury died on Tuesday at the age of 91. As well as being a giant of SF, he was also one of Tarkovsky's favourite authors (despite the fact that Tarkovsky often used to claim that he didn't like SF). Here is something from my book Andrei Tarkovsky that suggests a link between the two maestros:

In summarising Bradbury’s masterpiece, The Martian Chronicles, John Clute and Peter Nicholls draw attention to the book’s qualities, which are positively Tarkovskian:‘The mood is of loneliness and nostalgia… throughout the book appearances and reality slip, dreamlike, from the one to the other… [it has an] antitechnological bias, the celebration of simplicity and innocence as imagined in small-town life, the sense of loss as youth changes to adulthood.' - John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Orbit, 1993, p.151.

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